Mar 20, 2013

Cosmopolis

“Money has taken a turn,” says Eric’s chief of
theory, Vija Kinsky (Samantha Morton, a mesmerizing, droning delivery system),
one of the handful of visitors who pop in and out of Eric’s limo, dispensing
bad news and aperçus. The Greeks had a word for the art of moneymaking
(“chrimatistikos”), but now, she continues, “all wealth has become wealth for
its own sake,” and money, having lost its narrative quality, “is talking to
itself.” From the way that Eric’s business is quickly spiraling downward, money
appears to have stopped talking to him. This may be why he wants a haircut, but
only from his father’s old barber, a yearning that summons up family,
tradition, simplicity and those old lost days when money bought something
tangible, something you could touch as effortlessly as the bristles of newly
shorn hair (ManohlaDargis, Master of a Shrinking Universe,New York Times, August 16, 2012).

"I loved the baht. But your system
is so microtimed that I couldn't keep up with it. I couldn't find it. It's so
infinitesimal. I began to hate my work, and you, and all the numbers on my
screen, and every minute of my life."

"One hundred satang to the baht.
What's your real name?"

"You wouldn't know it."

"Tell me your name."

He sat back and looked away. Telling his
name seemed to strike him as an essential defeat, the

most intimate failure
of character and will, but also so inevitable there was no point resisting.

"Sheets. Richard Sheets."

"Means nothing to me."

He said these words into the face of
Richard Sheets. Means nothing to me. He felt a trace of the old stale pleasure,
dropping an offhand remark that makes a person feel worthless. So small and

forgettable a thing
that spins such disturbance.

"Tell me. Do you imagine that I
stole ideas from you? Intellectual property"

"What does anyone imagine? A hundred
things a minute. Whether I imagine a thing or not, it's real to me. I have
syndromes where they're real, from Malaysia for example. The things I imagine
become facts. They have the time and space of facts."

"You're forcing me to be reasonable.
I don't like that."

"I have severe anxieties that my sex
organ is receding into my body."

"But it's not."

"Shrinking into my abdomen."

"But it's not."

"Whether it is or not, I know it
is."

"Show me."

"I don't have to look. There are
folk beliefs. There are epidemics that happen. Men in the

thousands, in real
fear and pain."

He closed his eyes and fired a shot into
the floorboards between his feet. He didn't open his eyes

until the report
stopped vibrating through the room.

"All right. People like you can
happen. I understand this. I believe it. But not the violence. Not the gun. The
gun is all wrong. You're not a violent man. Violence is meant to be real, based
on real

motives, on forces in
the world that what. That make us want to defend ourselves or take aggressive

action. The crime you
want to commit is cheap imitation. It's a stale fantasy. People do it because
other people do it. It's another syndrome, a thing you caught from others. It
has no history."

"It's all
history." He said, "The whole thing is history. You are foully and
berserkly rich. Don't tell

me about your
charities."

"I have no charities."

"I know this."

"You don't resent the rich. That's
not your sensibility"

"What's my sensibility?"

"Confusion. This is why you're
unemployable."

"Y?

"Because you want to kill
people."

"That's not why I'm
unemployable."

"Then why?"

"Because I stink. Smell me."

"Smell me," Eric said.

The subject thought about this.

"Even when you self-destruct, you
want to fail more, lose more, die more than others, stink more than others. In
the old tribes the chief who destroyed more of his property than the other
chiefs was the most powerful."

"What else?"

"You have
everything to live and die for. I have nothing and neither. That's another
reason to kill

you."

"Richard. Listen."

"I want to be known as Benno."

"You're unsettled because you feel
you have no role, you have no place. But you have to ask

yourself whose fault
this is. Because in fact there's very little for you to hate in this
society."

This made Benno laugh. His eyes went
slightly wild and he looked around him, shaking and

laughing. The laughter
was mirthless and disturbing and the shaking increased. He had to put the

weapon on the table so
he could laugh and shake freely.

Eric said, "Think."

"Think."

"Violence needs a cause, a
truth."

He was thinking of the bodyguard with the
scarred face and air of close combat and the hard squat Slavic name, Danko,
who'd fought in wars of ancestral blood. He was thinking of the Sikh with the missing
finger, the driver he'd glimpsed when he shared a taxi with Elise, briefly,
much earlier in the day, in the life, a time beyond memory nearly. He was
thinking of Ibrahim Hamadou, his own driver, tortured for politics or religion
or clan hatreds, a victim of rooted violence driven by the spirits of his enemies'
forebears. He was even thinking of Andre Petrescu, the pastry assassin, all
those pies in the face and the blows he took in return.

Finally he thought of the burning man and
imagined himself back at the scene, in Times Square,

watching the body on
fire, or in the body, was the body, looking out through gas and flame.

"There's nothing in the world but
other people," Benno said.

He was having trouble
speaking. The words exploded from his face, not loud so much as impulsive,
blurted under stress.

"I had this thought one day. It was
the thought of my life. I'm surrounded by other people. It's buy and sell. It's
let's have lunch. I thought look at them and look at me. Light shines through
me on the street, I'm what's the word, pervious to visible light."

He spread his arms wide.

"I thought all these other people. I
thought how did they get to be who they are. It's banks and car parks. It's
airline tickets in their computers. It's restaurants filled with people
talking. It's people

signing the merchant
copy. It's people taking the merchant copy out of the leather folder and then signing
it and separating the merchant copy from the customer copy and putting their
credit card in

their wallet. This
alone could do it. It's people who have doctors who order tests for them. This
alone," he said. "I'm helpless in their system that makes no sense to
me. You wanted me to be a helpless robot soldier but all I could be was
helpless."

Eric said, "No."'

"It's women's shoes. It's all the
names they have for shoes. It's all those people in the park behind the
library, talking in the sun."

"No. Your crime has no conscience.
You haven't been driven to do it by some oppressive social

force. How I hate to
be reasonable. You're not against the rich. Nobody's against the rich.
Everybody's ten seconds from being rich. Or so everybody thought. No. Your
crime is in your head. Another fool shooting up a diner because because."

He
looked at the Mk.23 lying on the table.

"Bullets flying through the walls
and floor. So useless and stupid," he said. "Even your weapon is a fantasy.
What is it called?"

The subject looked hurt and betrayed.

"What's the attachment that abuts
the trigger guard? What is it called? What does it do?"

"All right. I don't have the manhood
to know these names. Men know these names. You have the experience of manhood.
I can't think that far ahead. It's all I can do to be a person."

"Violence needs a burden, a
purpose."

He pressed the muzzle of his gun, Eric
did, against the palm of his left hand. He tried to think

clearly. He thought of
his chief of security flat on the asphalt, a second yet left in his life. He
thought of others down the years, hazy and nameless. He felt an enormous remorseful
awareness. It moved through him, called guilt, and strange how soft the trigger
felt against his finger.

"What are you doing?"

"I don't know. Maybe nothing,"
he said.

He
looked at Benno and squeezed the trigger. He realized the gun had one round
left just about the time it fired, the briefest instant before, way too late to
matter. The shot blew a hole in the middle of his hand.

He sat head down, out of ideas, and felt
the pain. The hand went hot. It was all scald and flash. It seemed separate
from the rest of him, pervertedly alive in its own little subplot. The fingers
curled, middle finger twitching. He thought he could feel his pressure drop to
shock level. Blood ran down both sides of the hand and a dark discoloration, a
scorch mark, began to spread across the palm.

He shut his eyes against the pain. This
made no sense but then it did in a way, intuitively, as a

gesture of
concentration, his direct involvement in the action of pain reducing hormones.

The man across the table was folded over
in his shroud. There seemed nothing left for him,

anywhere, that might
be worth doing or thinking about. Words fell out of the towel, or sounds, and
he held one hand over the other, the bent hand pressing the still, the flat,
the other hand, in identification and pity.

There was pain and there was suffering.
He wasn't sure if he was suffering. He was sure Benno

was suffering. Eric
watched him apply a cold compress to the ravaged hand. It wasn't a compress and
it wasn't cold but they agreed unspokenly to use this term for whatever
palliative effect it might have.

The echo of the shot rang electrically
through his forearm and wrist.

Benno knotted the compress caringly under
the thumb, two handkerchiefs he'd spent some time

spiraling together. At
the lower forearm was a tourniquet he'd employed, a rag and pencil arrangemen

He went back to the sofa and studied Eric
in pain. "I think we should talk."

"We're talking. We've been
talking."

"I feel I know you better than
anyone knows you. I have uncanny insights, true or false. I used to watch you
meditate, online. The face, the calm posture. I couldn't stop watching. You
meditated for hours sometimes. All it did was send you deeper into your frozen
heart. I watched every minute. I looked into you. I knew you. It was another
reason to hate you, that you could sit in a cell and meditate and I could not.
I had the cell all right. But I never had the fixation where I could train the
mind, empty the mind, think one thought only. Then you shut down the site. When
you shut down the site I was I don't know, dead, for a long time after."

There was a softness in the face, a
regret at the mention of hate and coldheartedness. Eric wanted to respond. The
pain was crushing him, making him smaller, he thought, reducing him in size,
person and value. It wasn't the hand, it was the brain, but it was also the
hand. The hand felt necrotic. He thought he could smell a million cells dying.

He wanted to say something. The wind blew
through again, stronger now, stirring the dust of these toppled walls. There was
something intriguing in the sound, wind indoors, the edge of something, the feel
of something unprotected, an inside-outness, papers blowing through the halls,
the door banging nearly shut, then swinging out again.

He said, "My prostate is
asymmetrical."

His voice was barely audible. There was a
pause that lasted half a minute. He felt the subject regard him carefully, the
other. There was a sense of warmth, of human involvement.

"So is mine," Benno whispered.

They looked at each other. There was
another pause. "What does it mean?"

Eric didn't think he'd ever known such
relief, hearing these words from a man who shared his

condition. He felt a
sweep of well-being. An old woe gone, the kind of half smothered knowledge
thathaunts the idlest thought. The hankies were blood-soaked. He felt a peace,
a sweetness settle over him.

He still held the gun
in his good hand.

Benno sat nodding in his towel shroud.

He said, "You should have listened
to your prostate."

"What?"

"You tried to predict movements in
the yen by drawing on patterns from nature. Yes, of course.

The mathematical
properties of tree rings, sunflower seeds, the limbs of galactic spirals. I
learned this with the baht. I loved the baht. I loved the cross-harmonies
between nature and data. You taught me this. The way signals from a pulsar in
deepest space follow classical number sequences, which in turn can describe the
fluctuations of a given stock or currency. You showed me this. How market
cycles can be interchangeable with the time cycles of grasshopper breeding,
wheat harvesting. You made this form of analysis horribly and sadistically
precise. But you forgot something along the way."

"What?"

"The importance of the lopsided, the
thing that's skewed a little. You were looking for balance,

beautiful balance,
equal parts, equal sides. I know this. I know you. But you should have been
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